go alone, and never speak of this again
by arahir
Summary: The ghost of what Shiro's lost haunts him and Keith tries to find a way home. / After they land and argue and assign blame and revoke it and mourn, but in that first moment, relief coursing through him, Shiro smiles. "Nice work, Keith." He never responds.
1. Chapter 1

The barrier goes up like a dying star. When the light clears, the shield around the Galra cruiser is gone, along with the Galra fighter. The realization comes in fits and starts, filling in the silence where Keith's voice should be coming over the radio, familiar and rough and dear.

And gone.

That takes time. That comes after. After they land and argue and assign blame and revoke it and mourn, but in that first moment, relief coursing through him, Shiro smiles.

"Nice work, Keith."

He never responds.

* * *

"Maybe the explosion knocked out his radio," Pidge says to the silence, but the tone of her voice says what they're all thinking: if the explosion knocked his radio out, it could have done worse. Probably did do worse, but they'll find him, even if his ship is dead in the water and they have to sift through the mass of wreckage from the Galra cruiser that's floating all around them.

The radio crackles, and relief surges for the half second it takes before the voice comes through—it isn't Keith.

"Guys, I'm sorry, I tried to stop him, but he just—" Matt's face pops up on their screens. He's got his head down, hands in his hair. "I'm sorry," he says again. "I'm so sorry."

"Keith?" Shiro tries over the radio again. There's nothing but silence.

Nothing.

"I'm sorry," Matt repeats.

He closes his eyes, the after burn of the explosion playing behind his lids on loop, and he knows what Matt's going to say before he says it, but there's no steeling himself, nothing solid to brace his thoughts against.

"Keith," Matt chokes. "He—"

"He ran his ship into the barrier," Lance whispers, and that's the second time today he's surprised Shiro.

Everything tunnels on those words; something in his mind collapses, pulling everything in with it, and there's not enough room in him suddenly. He can only pick up one thing at a time and look at it: the wetness between Matt's fingers over the video feet, where they're pressed against his face. The breathy sound Allura makes over the radio.

What's left of the Galra cruiser, glittering and spinning outward like a second set of stars against the black.

But he's the leader. "Shiro?" someone asks, and later he won't remember who, but he'll remember his own stillness, like maybe if he didn't breathe or speak or move, time would stop moving against him.

He imagines it: the cruiser's scattered pieces pulling in, piecing itself back together, the net of purple light coalescing, and the Galra fighter there, intact and safe.

"Shiro?" someone asks again.

Voltron falls apart.

* * *

That first day is long, and full of the kind of dreary that settles into his bones.

He sees Lance and Hunk when they get back to the ship, hang-dog tired, and Pidge off to the side, face buried in Matt's chest.

Say something, he tells himself. That's his duty; that's what a leader does. But every kind word flees from him the moment he tries to give it life, like he's back on Earth, trying to pick out one star, watching it disappear as he focuses on it. There's no silver lining to this. There's no comfort.

Allura is stoic, but when she asks, "Why didn't he say anything?" That's what nearly undoes him. Shiro steals a moment to lean against the wall, close his eyes, and try not to imagine those last moments again. Radio silence, the Galra fighter hurtling toward the barrier, his imagination drawing the scene in horrific technicolor.

Keith could have said goodbye, but would that make it easier for any of them? Would it have made it easier for Keith to have them screaming in his ear, Shiro ordering him to stand down—

He pushes off the wall, running from that thought. After the attack and the exhaustion of fighting Naxzela's gravity, they're on their last legs, but some things won't wait.

Telling Kolivan is the most immediate concern, and of course, it falls to him. It feels like it should be the other way around. He needs someone to explain this to him before he can explain it to anyone else. Shock and denial are warring for supremacy in his mind; in the neutral ground between them, he can be functional.

Kolivan takes it with the grace he's due.

 _He's had practice,_ Shiro thinks, and hates himself for it. Kolivan leads differently, but no worse, and maybe he could teach Shiro how he deals with a loss like this. Knowledge or death is the Blade's creed, but _knowledge_ is nothing but a fancy stand in for victory—they're Galra, through and through. The mission, before all things. That's all this is—that's what Keith was, from the day they met. Without Keith, they would all be dead, but for some reason the weight of that against Keith's life isn't panning out the way it should in his head.

Keith would have died anyway, he thinks, and his mind spins on conditions, like there's a second half to that argument where they all could have gotten out of this whole and unscathed.

But no. That was never in the cards. Their luck was always going to run out eventually. Someone was going to lose, and lose all, and Keith might have been their rock, but he was never unbreakable.

This is what it takes to win.

* * *

"You should take a break," Hunk tells him, soft-eyed and quiet, when they pass in the kitchen.

They're both still in armor, grabbing food as they can between shifts and plans and trying to figure out what to do with the Galra fleet now that they have it cut off and cornered but have half as many coalition forces to send out against it.

Every hair on him bristles at the suggestion. He doesn't need to be coddled through this. He doesn't deserve to be.

No one will say it, but this is his fault. His plan, and a third of the rebel fleet lost. His plan, and the entire coalition nearly destroyed. His plan, and _Keith_ —

It's a win at the highest cost imaginable, and still, they got off easy.

If they'd had a chance to scout Naxzela before hand, he thinks, and chases it with a hundred thoughts like it. If Keith was still on the team, if they'd left Naxzela at the first sign of danger, if he'd let Keith take on the cruiser before it had a shield up—this is on his shoulders, and he feels that guilt like something sinuous and heavy curled around his neck, cutting off his air breath by breath.

"I'm fine," Shiro says. It's a lie, but Hunk doesn't test him on it. He's been snappy, and they know it. His frustration isn't a symptom of this mess but a cause.

If he'd listened, none of this would have happened, and it would be Keith telling him to take a break. If he'd listened, Keith would still be here.

The thought sneaks up on him and punches the air out of his chest.

If he'd listened—

Hunk frowns, holds out a hand, asks, "Shiro?" That's all the warning either of them have before he's reeling in grief.

This is every string cut, every opportunity lost, and no second chances. Shiro remembers watching Keith go, seeing the frown on his face, and thinking he'd feel better after he had time to cool off—but did he? Is that how Keith died? Thinking that they didn't want him? That he'd disappointed them?

At the edge of his awareness, Hunk tuts and pulls him into a hug.

It dawns all at once. Keith's face hovering above his in the desert shack, that first morning back on Earth. His steady voice over the radio when they were stranded and he was wounded, and there was never any question in Keith's mind that Shiro would make it through. His confidence was infectious, but that was a mistake, he realizes now.

Keith didn't operate on confidence. He was conviction, manifest, and he would do anything—give anything—to do what had to be done. That's all.

There's a heavy hand in his hair, and tears on his face, and that's how they stay until Shiro can breathe again.

* * *

"Someone should check his room."

Lance is the first one to say it, where Shiro might have been content to never walk down that hallway again. It's been two weeks, and he's managed so far.

Check, Lance says, like maybe Keith will be back soon and they need to make sure everything is in order for him. It's the most delicate way to put it, by far, but Shiro is too tired to play around with pretty words and phrases.

His headache spikes. "I'll do it," he says. It's impossible to keep his tone on the level, steady cadence he's been cultivating since Naxzela. Snapping won't help, and it's already hurt them in ways that can't be fixed.

"We'll all go," Allura assures him. He wants to argue, but maybe it'll distract him from whatever's waiting inside there. It's the same feeling he used to get before a new sim test: he never had any idea what to expect, but his imagination ran fast and wild on the possibilities. It was never as bad as he imagined.

He reminds himself of that as they make their way to Keith's room—all of them together, Coran bringing up the rear. He's been quiet since the battle, like Matt has. Shiro hasn't had the will to ask them what it was like, or what Keith said, or what he sounded like at the end. His imagination isn't kind, but sometimes reality is worse.

That's his last thought before the door to Keith's room slides open in front of him, and the irony cuts.

Yes, reality _is_ worse, because the room is empty.

He thinks for a moment that it's the wrong one somehow, but then he spots the clothes. They're folded and stacked in a neat pile on the unmade bed, though it barely counts as unmade when the only thing on it is a rumpled blanket. The only thing missing is his jacket, but the strike of red and gold and white on the hook by the door draws his eye, and that's it. His jacket, his pants and shirt and boots.

That's it.

Lance is the first one to speak. "Not very messy, was he?" The words are tight, the barest glint of humor trying to shine through. It almost works.

But—he was. He was messy back at the Garrison, back at the shack: half finished projects and open books and brief obsessions filling in the corners of his bunk. When did that change? He wonders, and with pain: why didn't you notice?

The others seem frozen. No one really wants to walk in and confront it. He wonders, briefly, what he would have done if he'd sat down in the cockpit of the simulator and found an hour of open space. Nothing unexpected, nothing to avoid, nothing to fear—nothing. It would have driven him nuts.

That's exactly what this is.

"I'll handle it," he hears himself say, still staring at the jacket by the door, and his tone gets across what he can't put into words: there's exactly enough space in the room for one person. The pain behind his eyes has been building with the dull thudding in his chest, and the piercing white of the overhead lights has it peaking. Someone starts to object, but he can't make himself care who. They go quiet at the soft sound of an elbow smacking cloth, and the door slides shut behind their shuffling feet, leaving him alone with—nothing.

He's so still for so long that the motion activated lights power off, and when he finally makes himself move, only the soft blue track lighting around the floor goes on. It's enough to see by, but eerie, like he's walking in a tomb.

The jacket is what draws him first. There's not a memory he has of Keith that doesn't include that jacket. Even back at the Garrison, though it was too large for him then: the sleeves stretched over his hands, even cuffed, and the collar hid his face. It was barely a crop jacket then, and Shiro's hands are just barely brushing the hem of it when he remembers seeing Keith, that first morning after Kerberos and captivity.

It's his first clear memory of Earth—the edge of that jacket, right in front of his eyes, and a hand on his neck; Keith leaning over him, checking his pulse. And Shiro remembers lying on his side, looking at the red and white and the thin black cloth of his t-shirt stretching over his ribs, and thinking: _this can't be real_.

It's not. Not anymore. But the jacket still smells like him.

He makes a space for himself on the bed and pulls it to his face. Something in him spares a moment to wonder what he's doing, but this is it. This is all he has. It smells like sweat, and something he can convince himself is uniquely keith, like the desert after a storm, but though the rational part of him says it's old leather and nothing more.

It feels like more.

The collar is ridiculous. It always was, and he can't look at it without seeing Keith's neck like a double-image. Pale skin over muscle, veins like wires below his skin, pulse fluttering. It's so clear, and something he hadn't realized he'd noticed at all, but his mind pulls it up like he recorded in high definition. This is years away from simple observation, he realizes. You don't memorize the line of someone's collar bone if you don't want them.

This is desire. This is obsession.

That realization is an unveiling; everything else falls into place. He's lying in Keith's bed, holding Keith's clothes, picturing his bare skin with high definition precision, trying to part out his smell from the clean static of the ship. There's only one word for what this is.

It's a truth he buried, a stone he kicked down the road to deal with some day when he had time and space. He's too tired to deny it.

 _You gave up what you loved ,_ he thinks, and lets sleep pull him under.

* * *

There's no single, purposeful blow the Galra could have struck that would have done so much damage.

"We're stretched thin," Kolivan says over the map of their sector that proves it in clear numbers: a third of the Empire is theirs, but they don't have the means to keep it. Kolivan presents it like simple fact, but what he means is that he's lost too many men.

The Blades' missions are run solo more often than not. Infiltration requires a scalpel touch, not blunt force, and Shiro realizes there was something more to Keith's offhand mention that Kolivan accompanied him on almost every one.

He tunes out the conversation by accident, lost in watching Kolivan's heavy expression and the familiar hang of his shoulders. Shiro knows that weight. It's made a home on his back since Naxzela.

Keith's name brings him crashing back to the conversation at hand. Allura being diplomatic, seeing what Shiro sees, trying to commiserate in mourning.

But Kolivan's lips turn down at the reminder. "He was a good soldier. We mourn his loss with you."

Shiro knows that tone of voice like the ache behind his eyes. It's pablum. It's what you say to keep an ally—it's what you say because you have to, and it doesn't leave room for discussion. That's the point. Kolivan lets his words settle and then nods to them, dismissing himself.

Shiro follows him out, like there's a rope knotted between his ribs, pulling him after any connection, any spare scrap of what he's lost, since they have none. Nothing. He has nothing, like Keith was always ready to disappear, or never there at all.

Kolivan pauses once they're out of listening distance of the bridge, half turning back to Shiro. He doesn't say anything, and that's the moment Shiro realizes he doesn't know what he wants to say.

Kolivan spares him the awkward silence. "I know how close he was to you. I am sorry, Shiro."

A consolation, not a comfort, and there's an edge to it. It's not what he wanted to hear, not what he needed to know. He can't let Kolivan walk away without getting something, and there has to be something better than the sour tang in the back of his mouth that Kolivan's words leave.

 _How close he was to you. How close, and he didn't say goodbye._

Shiro's mouth opens on a question and stalls, and what comes out instead is nothing like what he intended. "Was he happy?" he asks, and suddenly that's it. That's the question he needs answered most, because Kolivan is the last one of them who saw him in person, the last one who knew him well enough to tell, and if Keith _was_ happy, that's something at least.

Kolivan's eyes go wide, and then narrow, the lines at the corners of his eyes and over his brow showing his age.

"No," he says, and the floor drops out. "Keith was many things, but he was never happy with us." He says it like an apology, but it's still got that edge, and this time it cuts.

It's disappointment, Shiro realizes. Kolivan is disappointed, but it's not clear who with. Himself, or Shiro—Keith, maybe.

When he speaks again, he sounds tired. "But don't make light of his choice. That's not why he did it. It was never about him."

Shiro already knew that. Of course it wasn't about Keith. It never was. Nothing in Keith's life was about him.

The thought is crippling. Kolivan starts walking again and gets half way down the hallway before Shiro can think past it and gather himself. "Wait—did he leave anything with you?"

"Everything he had he left on this ship," Kolivan says, half-turning. "Unless you want his spare clothes. They're too small to be reused."

 _Yes_ , Shiro thinks, headache blinding him. If that's all they have, there's nothing he wants more. It's something.

Kolivan must notice the look on his face, and Shiro can't imagine what it is he sees, but he nods. "I'll send them along."

It's not until later, when he's lying in bed sleepless and aching, fingering the edges of Keith's jacket where it's spread across his chest that Kolivan's words come back to him:

 _Everything he had, he left on the ship._

He had no possessions beyond the clothes on his back and the knife on his belt, but that's not what Kolivan was referring to, Shiro realizes.

There was a moment. A last moment. Keith in front of him, saying he was leaving the team, voice hoarse the way it always got when he couldn't contain his emotions—and he never could, not for long. The light on Olkarion was half-past sunset, and it sets his eyes and hair glowing. He was pale from months under the hood and mask of a Marmora agent—and something more. Fear, or something like it, casting a pall over him, and Shiro remembers it because the moment he set his hand on Keith's shoulder his eyes went wide and bright and his face lost all its blood.

He remembers it because it's the first time he saw Keith scared. He remembers it because it's the first time he saw Keith scared of him.

In a month of sleepless nights, fighting the ache in his head, he couldn't figure out why. Not until now, and the thought comes to him fresh and raw, cutting right through the center of him: if he'd asked Keith to stay, he would have, but Keith didn't want to.

He didn't want to stay on the team. Not if Shiro was going to push him away.

The only thing Keith was ever selfish about was him.

His heart breaks on it.

* * *

The Blades come through. They burn his spare suit and it's so small when it's not stretched over muscle and bone.

The irony isn't lost on him. Why burn something twice? This is what Keith was wearing when he died, he thinks, watching the flames leap on the makeshift pyre in the perpetual Olkarion sunset. The black cloth and hard synthetic of the armor take time to burn; it's built to survive a perfect vacuum. Fire is something different; something worse. It takes everything.

The explosion didn't leave them a scrap. They looked, searched, pulled bodies from the cruiser's detritus. Burnt, mangled, frozen in space, almost beyond recognition. But there was nothing pale enough under the char, nothing small enough.

Shiro had to call it off eventually, because no one else would say what they were thinking: all of Keith's remains were scattered in the dust around them.

The others mourn together, leaving emblems in the fire, little sacrifices that honor Keith's. If he were any kind of man, he'd leave something, too. Something precious, something invaluable, but when he leaves his room that afternoon and sees the pile of Keith's clothes sitting by his bed, the thought of burning them is horrific. Imagining it sends his head thudding in pain and panic.

He can't lose that.

"You don't have to put on a brave face. I mean, I remember you two back at the Garrison. I'm so sorry." Matt tells him, when they're the only ones left.

Keith was a star then—the kind that was going to burn out, fall from the sky, leave scorched earth and ruin where he landed. And Shiro followed him. That's the difference. Even then, everyone thought it was the other way, like he was the one dragging Keith around and propping him up, but it was never that. Shiro grounded him, maybe, or gave him something earthbound to cling to, but he was bright enough on his own. Too bright. He always had an air about him like he could disappear if you looked away for too long.

That's exactly what he did, in the end.

The flames consume the last of the suit in a slow smolder that Shiro couldn't tear his eyes from if he wanted to. It's hypnotic. For a moment there's a hue to the fire that seems out of place—a fluorescent violet hiding around the last distinguishable edges of the pile of cloth and armor. That color is for the Galra; everything else on Olkarion is hued in in gold and yellow and warmth, but the violet persists, drawing in his eyes. Something in the make up of the suit, he thinks, as it gets more distinct, some strange element.

What burns violet?

It changes as he watches, and he can almost imagine it's forming the outline of something new.

"What happened?" Matt asks, startling him out of it. When he glances back, the violet is gone.

Matt's question sounds rhetorical, like a question he doesn't need or want answered. He doesn't mean _why did he do it_. They all know why, and it wasn't about any of them. It wasn't wrong. It was the right thing to do, but painful. A win, at the most dire cost.

Shiro rolls answers around until he settles on, "I let him go."

It's an admittance of guilt. This was Keith's choice, from start to finish, but there was something inevitable about it. The Blades' missions demand absolute sacrifice, and always have. At some point he was going to take a dangerous mission, a fatal mission. It's one thing to risk your life when you have 120 tons of robotic lion to back you up, but it's another to take on the Galra face-first wearing what the Blades wear.

Being a Paladin is like taking on the enemy in a tank. Keith was out there in cardboard and silk by comparison, and Shiro didn't try to stop it. This is a self inflicted wound—in more way than one.

He pushed Keith to the edge of duty and asked him to step over. And Keith did, but not in the direction he was hoping for.

Matt is watching him, another question in his eyes. He's smart like Pidge is. It's rare to find someone who understands people almost as well as they do tech.

"He was the pilot of the Black Lion," Shiro confesses.

Matt looks taken aback. "But—"

"I asked him to be. I told him if anything happened, that's what I wanted. But he didn't want it."

What did Keith want? he wonders suddenly. Was finding a cause worth dying for enough?

It's a bizarre thought, and rings false. Keith was young, and human, and scared. He wasn't some ethereal avatar of duty. He had a code, but he loved bikes and the thrill of being in the pilot's seat and good food and—

Shiro gasps and presses a hand to his eyes. "He saved me after Kerberos, and he saved me after—" There's something tight in his throat, burning over his cheeks. "And I just couldn't get my head on straight. I took it out on him. He tried to talk to me and I ordered him to leave. I actually said _that's an order_."

 _You did this._

"Hey," Matt says softly, "we all say things we regret. I know he didn't blame you."

He's right. Keith never blamed him for anything. It was a liberty he took, but only when it counted. Only when he thought he had to—only when Keith would feel it the most.

That's enough. He leaves Matt with the last of the pyre and not a word. He doesn't understand, and doesn't spare a glance to be offended as Shiro walks away.

When he gets to his room, Keith's jacket is where he left it on his bed. The smell of him is fading. It's testament to his obsession that he can tell. He lies with the collar pressed to his face, his arms wrapped around it in a parody of a hug.

There's almost nothing he wouldn't give, he thinks.

* * *

There isn't time to mourn in a war.

There's time to plan, time to gather their forces and give a nice speech. And there's time to fight.

Lotor is gone, but the Galra have rallied. The attack on Naxzela was successful in the most technical terms: a third of rebel forces are gone, and the Blades are spread too thin. All the pretty shows in the universe can't make up for what they've lost.

Lance isn't Keith, and neither is Shiro. There's an element of fire missing, and Allura's raw power is their saving grace. The Black Lion goes in flickers and starts—not like it's unwilling, but like half its energy is dedicated to something else.

 _To mourning_ , he thinks once, and then crushes it. The Black Lion takes the most energy to pilot on a good day, and those are long behind him. Thinking like that isn't going to help.

And the fighting is brutal. The Galra fleet they trapped behind the line of planets he drew with Naxzela is cornered, and they know it—they fight like it. Like something wounded, trapped, and dangerous. It's the kind of fighting Keith would have loved. His energy and speed and pragmatism were ready made for it.

Voltron, as it is now, isn't. The fighting doesn't end, and that much killing takes something out of them. He ends up spending more time in the Lion than not, until he's at the edge of the kind of exhaustion that leaves him too tired to sleep. He ends up sitting in the Lion in the hangar, trying to find the energy to drag himself out.

It's like he's back at the Garrison, trying to find his way out of bed after his alarm and a late night in the desert on Keith's bike.

That's the first time it happens.

* * *

The cockpit of the Black Lion powers down, the purple glow of the control stuttering out and leaving him in the dark with his own weariness. Fatigue settles over his limbs like a shroud, and he can't move under that much weight. Not even the arena took so much out of him, and now there's a hollowness behind his ribs that feels like a greater loss than his arm. There isn't time to sleep, though he imagines it for a moment.

The peripheral and self-indulgent thought whispers into his mind: this is a place where Keith has been. In this seat, his hands wrapped around the controls where Shiro's are now in the mockery of a handhold he can almost feel.

He doesn't realize his eyes are closed until he registers the play of light across his lids—light that shouldn't be there. When he blinks awake, it's to the sight of a body, drawn in lines of violet.

Keith, sitting on the control panel in front of him, arms folded, eyeing shiro with something fond at the edges of his lips and corners of his eyes, and he's made of light. He's wearing the Marmora armor, hood up, exactly like the last time Shiro saw him on the feed, but paler. He rises as Shiro stares, breathless and uncomprehending, the violet huing white where it trails after him, spiking and flickering around his edges.

It's beautiful. He's beautiful.

And then he seems to see Shiro like Shiro sees him, and his expression flickers and changes like a corrupted video file. All the grace he had in life is gone—he jerks forward a step, mouth open on a yell.

" _Shiro._ "

It comes across half-static and echoing, too distant to recognize as Keith's voice—but he's the only one that said Shiro's name like that, and Shiro would recognize it at the end of the world. The ghost's mouth flickers, closes and opens like he's skipping frames, and before he can say anything else, before Shiro can step forward or say a word or understand what's going on, he disappears.

He goes like a candle blown out, and leaves his after image burned into Shiro's eyes.

It's minutes before he remembers how to breathe. Minutes, and longer, some interminable amount of time before his eyes adjust to the new dark, and he remembers how to move, too. And the only thing he knows for certain, the only thing he can say without a doubt even through the panic and the terror is that he's not asleep.

It was real.

* * *

That's the first time it happens, and it only gets worse.

It's a haunting. He wakes up at night, at there's Keith, sitting on the edge of his bed, drawn in violet and glowing softly. Standing at the end of the hallway when no one else is around. Sitting across from him at the table during a midnight snack, head resting on his hand, smiling. And his voice, like something insidious, always there.

 _Nine o'clock_ , it whispers in his ear at the end of a battle, coming through like the sound of a television turned out too loud down a corridor. He turns the Lion without thinking, and sure enough, there's a Galra fighter coming in fast.

The voice is always right. Fire there, turn like this, stop and breathe—it knows what he needs to do, and it's a handicap he needs like never before. The Lion's functionality is crippled in some essential way that he doesn't have the time or will to get to the bottom of. The Bayard doesn't work and there's a lumbering slowness to the Lion that grows day by day—forming Voltron is like running a marathon. Sometimes it's all he can do to drag himself out of the Lion afterward and collapse in his room. Sometimes he doesn't make it that far.

The ghost never lasts long. A few seconds, a few words, and sometimes he looks as tired as Shiro feels.

 _You're projecting on it_ , he tells himself. But no. It's not real, and this is so much worse than projecting.

* * *

He wakes up in the middle of the night, after a day without fighting, when they've all had a chance to catch their breath and rest. It's a month after Naxzela and Keith's absence is still striking, but only to him. The others have settled into the new rhythm, and it's not much different from the old—Keith's been gone longer.

His grief is a private thing now, and he tries to keep it that way. When Lance jokes and the others laugh, he musters a smile and laughs with them. By bed he's distracted enough that when he lies in bed and pulls the jacket over his chest, he forgets what it means.

But the ghost doesn't.

He wakes up because there's light against his face, and when he opens his eyes, that's all he sees: violet, like he's caught in the blast range of a Galra cannon, but then he registers the fall of hair against his cheek and a hand against his hair.

And lips against his, dry and cold and dear.

It should be a shock, but if this is a creation of his own mind, this was inevitable. He's reaching up a hand to pull Keith in closer before he's even awake. His hand settles on—nothing.

There's nothing there.

The ghost can touch him, but he can't touch it, he realizes. It pulls away, and its eyes go wide when they open and see him staring back, see his hand in mid-air, displacing the light of its cheek. "You can see me," it says, and the voice comes through like a bell. Keith, through and through.

Shiro closes his eyes. "But you're not real."

It's quiet for a moment, and then Shiro feels the weight of a hand against his chest, over the jacket that's spread there. "You kept it." And then, softer: "You don't think I'm real?"

Rough voiced and sweet, and with his eyes closed, it's almost like he is real. When he's silent for too long, the ghost takes his head in its hands and kisses him again, deeper, and he can feel its weight settle over his hips and its fingers in his hair.

By the time it fades, he's ruined.

In the morning, when he wakes up, he doesn't remember falling asleep, but his body burns from everywhere it touched. It leaves him riled and shaking. Lance catches his eye when he walks on the bridge, concern twisting his face, and that's when Shiro realizes that it's gone too far.

There's no good way to mention this slow collapse in casual conversation, and no one he trusts enough to tell—not anymore, at least. Not after what he's lost.

It chips away at him all day, and he can't close his eyes without seeing that phantom light playing over his lids. By the time he gets back to his room, he's shaking with it, a subconscious quiver in his arms where they're holding him up over the sink.

Dead is dead. He's gotten Keith back twice; there's no third time coming. Whatever he saw, whatever he _felt_ —it was a hallucination. He needs sleep, and he needs to stop thinking about it, and he needs to get rid of the jacket. He should have burned it with the Marmora armor when he had the chance.

He wants, for the first time, to stop. There's no way through this. They'll win this war, but there's nothing waiting on the other side for him.

Keith saw made his choice and chose what was right, but he's not Keith.

The phantom hand settles against his back again, right there where he's standing. It's unwelcome. Whatever it is, it doesn't have a place in his grief. You don't get to mourn something you gave up—not like this.

 _It's not real_ , he tells himself. _It's not real._

But when he opens his eyes, Keith's face is in the mirror, right over his shoulder, limned in violet, and the hand on his back is moving—

He doesn't register what he's done until his fist is halfway in the wall, the mirror in pieces on the floor, and his hand is the only thing light in the room now, reflected up at him from the shards of glass on the floor, specks of light playing across the ceiling. The ghost is gone.

* * *

Coran knows loss better than any of them, and Shiro doesn't know how to clean up the glass alone.

The group treats Shiro like the adult in the room, and he is, but only as much as Keith was. Coran is it. And it means something that he can be the way he is even after all he's lost. Shiro wants an ounce of whatever he has that lets him carry on.

He takes one look at the ruined mirror on the floor and doesn't even blink, conjures something that might be a vacuum almost out of thin air, and has it squared away like there's not a thing wrong. But when he's done, he stays, wordless and waiting, like this is something Shiro will want to talk about.

A shattered mirror has to be the first sign of something bad, and he's no stranger to the disquiet of his own mind, but this seems like something worse, something deeper. He wants to ask Coran if Alfor ever haunts him, or Altea. Does he miss it like this? Is this a normal level of bereaved, or should they start finding a new pilot for the Black Lion? It's a question worth asking, but not the one he asks.

"Why don't you—" Why don't you mourn them is too cruel, and it's not true. "How did you move on?" he settles on.

Coran looks over from where he's inspecting the remnants of the mirror still stuck to the wall. "I haven't," he says with something earnest. "I don't suppose I ever will. I still remember them every day."

Them. That's what Altea was to him. Not just a planet, but his entire world lost. Everyone.

Keith is one man. One precious thing, in a universe of things worth fighting for, and Shiro still can't make that math work out in his head like it needs to.

"Did you ever see them? After?" he asks, because he has to, from where he's propped against the far wall.

"See them?" Coran frowns.

"Did you have ghosts on Altea?" It hadn't occurred to him that superstition on that level might be unique to humans, but that's a place to start.

Coran's frown gets deeper. "Are you seeing him?" There's true concern in his voice, and Shiro realizes, he can't keep this a secret. Someone needs to know if he's losing his mind. _He_ needs to know.

Shiro describes it, point by point. The first time in the Lion, and Keith's face in the mirror, and all the places in between. He leaves out what's private. That's too indulgent for anyone else to know about.

The frown on Coran's face morphs into confusion. "That doesn't sound like a ghost."

Like ghosts are a real thing to be analyzed. Like this isn't Shiro on the verge of a mental break. It's been days since his headaches had teeth, but the one that spikes through his temple at Coran's words is so bad he has to put a hand to the wall to stop himself from doubling over.

When it subsides, Coran is hovering beside him. "I'm fine," Shiro says, at the same moment the Castle starts powering down for the night cycle.

The lights in the room fade, and that's when he sees it, the now familiar purple haze of Keith's ghost, sitting on his bed. He's lit up like dust motes, like headlights against fog. He looks so real, it steals Shiro's breath.

He's watching them, and Coran—

Coran doesn't see him. His eyes are still focused on Shiro, concern molding his face despite the violet light casting it in shadows.

That's a confirmation of his worst fear: this _is_ all inside his head, and he's not fit to lead. Not like this.

Shiro lets himself curse, and slides down the wall to sit on the floor, right there, next to Coran. It's too much—to see this, day in and day out, to _lose_ this. Keith is dead and some essential part of him can't accept it. There's some fatal flaw in him now, and maybe his second round of captivity was what pushed him over that line.

Coran leans on the wall above his head and sighs. It's a sound Shiro has never heard him make.

"He looked for you," Coran tells him. "For months."

It's news to him, and unwelcome.

"Maybe... It could be the Lion," Coran says, like that makes sense.

Shiro is too tired to respond. Coran lays a hand on his shoulder. He wonders, suddenly, how much younger he is than Coran. Years or decades? Millennia, more than technically?

"We never understood what they were. They built themselves as much Alfor did. They have their own thoughts. You remember how the Red Lion went after Keith?"

Shiro doesn't nod. Of course he does. He remembers everything about Keith, like he's collecting facts. Limited edition, discontinued, priceless.

"The Lions were always partial to him," Coran mutters, with the smallest thread of jealousy.

He explains it in short words. Shiro isn't an engineer, isn't anything close to that, and he still can't meet Coran's eyes. If he looks, if he talks about what's been happening, he'll lose some part of himself. Better to pretend he's as cool and calm as everyone wants him to be. Coran lets him.

The lions are as much science as they are arcane, he explains. They still have a code. Alfor's ghost was intentional. That was something Alfor left behind on purpose, but this is an accident. This is some error in the Lion's code, coalescing and expanding, making a home for itself.

It's a lie, Shiro realizes. It's a story Coran is spinning for him, because they only have one person who can pilot the Black Lion now, and it can't be someone who's dead on their feet, conjuring ghosts, going mad.

When he feels something tapping on his shoulder in bed that night, he doesn't roll over to look at it. When he closes his eyes and feels the light play across his lids, he doesn't open them.

This too shall pass, he reminds himself. Everything does.


	2. Chapter 2

"I messed up," Keith says, still trying to catch his breath past the explosion and the tightness in his chest where he hit debris and Regris—fuck, _Regris_. "This is my fault. I—"

"Yes, it is." Kolivan interrupts, staring down at Keith where he's still letting the floor hold him up, and his voice is as cold as the vacuum of space that tried to suck the air out of Keith's suit.

The words steal what's left of his air, and in a final shame, his arms give out. He's left lying on his side, gasping, still, and there's something wrong with that but it's hard to think without air. Kolivan's eyes soften minutely, and then he frowns. "Keith?"

Kolivan kneels beside him and settles his hand over the rent in the side of his suit, and then slides it up over Keith's ribs, where he's heaving. He presses his thumb in against the cramped muscle and it's comforting—almost like he's a child again and his Dad is soothing him through some panic.

The touch gives him something to focus on; Kolivan doesn't say a word, not for minutes. And when he finally does, it's not scolding or worried.

"You can't be everything," he says. He sounds weary. He sounds like he knows he's talking to a brick wall.

Keith doesn't know how to not try.

* * *

Shiro lets him go.

It's different from the hologram he saw at the Blade's headquarters, but only because this Shiro has a reason to be disappointed in him. This Shiro lets him go with his blessing.

It hurts as much as it did the first time.

In months absent, he gets used to missing. He spent a year alone in the desert, he reminds himself. It's different, and the Blades are almost like a family.

Kolivan goes with him on every mission, like it's normal for their leader to go on a routine fact finding infiltration. Even after Keith is settled in his place and has enough experience to lead his own missions, he still goes. It's like having a family again. Someone to watch out for him, someone who cares if he comes back safe. Voltron was safer, but it was never a home.

He's learned that about himself. The Galaxy Garrison was a home, until he lost Shiro. The shack was a home, until he left it. The Castleship was a home, until he was needed more somewhere else.

He tries to make a home in places and duty, but he finds it in people.

After a mission that goes better than expected one of the Blades pulls him aside and pulls out a data pad. He doesn't understand what he's watching until he sees Shiro's face under a spotlight.

 _...with my bare hand_ , his tinny voice says through the pinhole speakers on the pad. It startles a laugh out of Keith, and then the Blade, and then Kolivan catches wind and it's the first moment of real joy they've had in weeks. The performance is pure agony.

It becomes a tradition. Keith never asks where they get the recordings, but he recognizes that it's at cost and effort—and they do it for him, first and foremost. The recordings fill him up and hollow him out at the same time. The shows are agonizing, the kind of work he could never have done for Voltron, but he watches the team grow and flourish and find their feet without him.

It's as sweet as it is bitter, and maybe more than.

This is better.

* * *

When it comes down to it, the decision isn't a conscious one,

It's easy to pilot a fighter in a straight line. That's the first thing they teach you. Hold steady, don't be tricked into a tilt. The Galra fighter is more like his bike than the ship or simulation, anyway—it comes natural. Dodging fire from the cruiser is like swinging around corners and cliffs in the desert; it's second nature.

There's no second option. That's the fact that settles into him as he flies toward the barrier. Maybe the team will make it to the cruiser in time, but the Blades don't operate on risk.

Fear grips him like a vice before the impact, and all he can think about is how much he wants someone there with him, like a child scared, and Shiro is what comes to mind even as the violet of the barrier shines through his closed eyes. Keith wants him there, because he's terrified like he's never been before and Shiro is something to hold on to—

But the impact never comes.

The light beyond his eyes gets brighter and brighter. At first he thinks something went wrong—he's inside the barrier, somehow, and his last and best plan has failed, but then the ship falls away. The grips under his hands, the seat below, fading out of existence.

When he opens his eyes, there's nothing there. Nothing anywhere. Stars above and below and an indistinct horizon, like a pane of glass.

"Shiro?"

No response. The radio isn't static; there's nothing to hear. He's alone, and the only sound is his own voice echoing and the tap of his foot when he takes an involuntary step forward. The echo makes it sound like he's walking on water.

And he realizes: this is what it's like to be dead.

* * *

He spends the first day walking, like if he goes far enough he'll find a door, or an edge, or some way out.

But it never changes. The stars are fixed and the horizon looks the same no matter where he turns, no matter how long he walks.

The sound of his own steps starts to drive him nuts. Even in the desert he never talked to himself. The bike, sometimes, maybe, but he can't talk to nothing, and that's all he has here.

When there's nowhere left to go, he sits, finally, and tries to come to terms with it. An eternity in solitude, but at least it's beautiful.

"I hope everyone made it," he mutters into his knees where his arms are wrapped around them. That's as far as he can think, because if he focuses on the thought that he'll never see them again, he really will go nuts.

Shiro is what his mind settles on, dully. It's like being a kid again, when he lost a tooth in a bad fall and no matter how much his Dad reminded him not to, he couldn't stop tonguing over the empty spot in his mouth and the tang of blood. That's what this loss feels like— _has_ felt like, for months.

Something broke between them, and he wasn't smart enough to know how to put it back together. That was always Shiro's job. Keith propped Shiro up and kept him safe, but Shiro held them together—until he didn't.

Anyone would get tired of it eventually.

Sleep drags at him, and it's a relief to let it pull him under.

* * *

He wakes in fire.

* * *

It takes him four days to figure out how to move.

It's like he has to pull the energy out of the air around him, but it's not like breathing in life; it's not like moving or existing. There's some barrier between him and reality that he has to push through before he can be something real, and even then, he can only see.

A ghost, he realizes. That's what he is. Something stuck between, and there's no question why. If ghosts from attachments, from desire, from something unfinished and yearning, that's what he was always destined to become.

The Lion is the easiest place to manifest. He takes to watching Shiro while he's piloting, whispering encouragements and suggestions. He only takes them when he's exhausted, but that's when he needs them most.

And he's always exhausted.

Shiro doesn't acknowledge him, and that's fine. Invisibility is a blessing. It gives him time to observe, like he never could in life. He follows Shiro like a shadow, pulled along in his wake. He was always the most beautiful thing in Keith's life, even gone, when all Keith had were photographs. Even when he came back changed.

Even now, after life.

His hair is longer. The white shock of hair falls over his face when he sleeps, and Keith finds himself reaching down to push it aside before he remembers he can't touch like that anymore. There are shadows under his eyes, and it doesn't make sense. In a dozen nights of watching Shiro sleep, he doesn't wake up once. It's not insomnia, and it's not hunger. Hunk notices what Keith does, and shoves food in his face and in his door and Shiro eats, but it's not enough.

He's cut down—tired and overworked, like Keith has never seen him, and it doesn't make sense. It can't be grief because Keith has been gone for weeks, and it can't be the effort of picking up Keith's spare slack because Keith has been off the team for longer than that.

Shiro sleeps like a dead man in every spare moment he has. Keith stands at the ends of hallways and watches Shiro drag himself to bed, watches him almost fall asleep at the table as he eats, watches him doze off in the lounge after meetings with his face pressed into the cushions of the couch.

And in his lion. Those are the best moments, because Keith can almost touch him. Almost, like he's touching smoke, but Shiro doesn't feel it.

There's one moment he thinks Shiro can see him, but the second Keith says his name, the second he steps forward, he fades—and he still can't touch.

That's his greatest fear. Touch is something special between them. A hand on a shoulder, under an arm, behind a back—holding and pulling and saying, _you're worth this._

But Keith can't touch. He tries a hundred times, pours himself into it and focuses and works, but he still can't touch.

Until he can.

* * *

Shiro sleeps with his jacket like it's a blanket,

 _Don't read into it_ , Keith tells himself, but it's impossible not to. Shiro pulls it to his face and breathes it in, and it's almost terrifying the way his metal hand fists in it and wrinkles the leather. If it were lit up, the jacket would burn.

It takes days and more of watching him to understand what he's seeing. There's no path forward for them, but it's a comfort to think that maybe, despite everything, some part of Shiro wanted him and misses him the same way Keith misses Shiro and life.

Two months in, everything changes. Time is different as a ghost, but Keith marks it because it's the first day he's seen Shiro smile since he became a ghost. He's beautiful with it.

As he watches Shiro sleep that night, it occurs to him that he has nothing left to lose. He feels strong. A kiss is so little, and so simple, and he's got nothing but his longing and the world of stars and glass. If he can have it, Keith wants it at least once before he fades.

He feels like he's fading.

Shiro is quiet when he sleeps, even though his lips are parted. Keith leans down and presses in—Shiro burns like a fire against him. It's a private thing, he thinks, but when he pulls back, Shiro's eyes are open and watching and wide with sorrow.

His hand is right there, outstretched and obscuring the middle of Keith's face, like he wanted to touch and is heartbroken to discover he can't.

"You can see me," Keith tries, before he can stop himself, but what he means is, _you can feel me._ The kiss was nothing, and still, Shiro felt it.

"But you're not real," Shiro whispers, closing his eyes.

He's not.

It hurts, even though it's the truth, because he feels real. For the first time since Naxzela, he can touch. Keith settles his hand over the jacket, fingering the leather, and the heat from Shiro's chest, and the muscle and bone beneath it.

It feels real.

"You kept it," he sighs. That means something. The heartbeat leaping under his hand means something. "You don't think I'm real?" he asks, because he has to know.

Shiro doesn't move or speak, but his breath catches in the air between them. Silence is its own answer, and all the permission he needs. If Shiro doesn't think this is real, then there's no cost to this, and nothing to lose. If Shiro wants him... Maybe there's something to gain, for both of them.

He pulls Shiro into another kiss and straddles Shiro's waist. There's something indulgent about how wide he has to stretch his legs to accommodate Shiro's width. He feels weightless, but Shiro's hands twitch on the bed beside him.

If he tried it in life, would Shiro have pushed him off? Pulled him in?

Is this what he missed? Is this what he could have done to fix them?

It doesn't matter now, he realizes. Nothing does.

There's a list of everything he wants to do, taking form in the back of his mind—a hundred little desires he only ever half realized in life, but Shiro is hot against him, and solid, and he gets it now. There's no strength to him now, but he has to be able to do _something_ —

Shiro breathes against him, and the illusion shatters.

Keith feels it, and feels the air go through him, like he really is nothing but smoke. Shiro is shaking, he realizes. This is what Keith wants, but if Shiro doesn't think he's real, what does Shiro think this is?

After Sendak, after the Galra tried to take the Castleship, Shiro was obsessed with the disquiet of his mind. Anything out of place was his fault—a symptom of his own mind going wrong, and there was a direct line between that and Shiro wanting Keith to take control of Voltron in his place.

If he knows Shiro, he knows this.

His presence is going to drive Shiro mad, or the nearest thing to it.

"I'm sorry," Keith whispers, and brushes his thumbs over Shiro's cheekbones, at the edge of the shadows under his eyes, and then pushes the hair off his face. If Shiro is still conscious enough to notice, there's no indication. No acknowledgment. Maybe it's self defense, Keith thinks.

The moment before the barrier comes back to him—the terror, and wanting Shiro, and nothing else. Maybe that's what the jacket is. Maybe that's all Shiro wants out of this.

Maybe that's all he needs.

Keith settles beside him on the bed, pushing his face into Shiro's neck where he burns, burying his arm under the jacket where it's lying against Shiro's chest. He trails his fingers up and down, trying to be something comforting rather than a burden.

It takes something out of him in the most literal sense. After an hour, Shiro's breathing is settled and his heartbeat is steady and slow, but Keith is running on empty.

It's less like falling asleep than it is like passing out.

When he wakes up, he's back in the other world and he feels like he's been beaten into the floor of the training deck by something bigger and meaner than he could ever hope to be. The crash finally catching up with him, he thinks. It's breaking him down little by little, and maybe there's some fixed amount of him left to spend.

He tries to manifest one more time, but Shiro doesn't want to see him.

Shiro puts a hand through his mirror, and that's all that's left between them.

* * *

After that, Shiro won't listen. Won't look. It gets harder to edge into his space. It gets harder to come awake at all. Keith feels less tangible, like a spark at the edge of fading.

The world with the stars is pulling him in and under.

It's quiet and calm, and it takes nothing out of him to be there. Not like reality.

Every moment in Shiro's world is a struggle, like the air around him is trying to tear bits of him off. It reminds him of the mission where they lost Regris—where _he_ lost Regris—the gash in his suit, the vacuum of space sucking the air and warmth out of him.

That's exactly how it feels, but he's nothing if not a fighter.

* * *

The saving grace is that he can go where the Lion goes.

It comes to a head at the end of a fight he wishes he was in. Trapping a Galra fleet sounds like a good idea, until you have to deal with the leftovers and find them twice as fierce as anything you've fought before. They can't disable interfleet communications like they could on Naxzela.

The battles so far have been brutal, but this one is more.

Within minutes, it's a killing field. There's no outpost to fight, nothing to defend. It's a last hurrah—and the Galra know it. They're guarding their flagship with the last of their forces, and they're smart about it. Flagship, they call it, but in name only, because anything else with cannons like that would be a battleship—and the best of them, at that. It's a fighter, through and through, and the rebel forces are nothing before it.

Keith watches it all from the cockpit of the Lion, hovering behind Shiro, not touching. It doesn't matter—he doesn't have enough energy to be felt, but it's the last wall Shiro put up between them, and it's not his place to try.

The Galra are on the defensive. They know what Voltron can do, but Voltron is AWOL, and Keith doesn't understand why until he sees the sweat on Shiro's face and the way he's heaving for breath. It's been minutes since they entered the fight, and there's no reason for him to be exhausted like that, except—

Shiro isn't tired, Keith realizes.

He's sick.

They form Voltron, and it falls apart.

They form it again, and again, it fails. This time, the Galra take the opportunity, and take the shot. The cannon takes out a contingent of rebel ships and the Yellow Lion with it. Hunk's voice comes in through over the radio, but there's nothing they have that can take that on. Shiro has the Bayard, but it's dormant. He can't even form the jawblade, and he's on the edge of passing out.

It's a fight for their lives, Keith realizes halfway through. They've bitten off so much more than they can chew, and it hinges on Shiro and his weakness.

"Shiro?" He tries to pull in enough energy in to become solid, but the moment he does, Shiro gasps and puts a hand to his head like he's in agony—

That's the moment Keith realizes what's going on.

Shiro isn't sick, and Keith isn't a ghost.

The Black Lion saved him.

That place he found himself in isn't death. No—it's a place between. It's a place for _him_. The Lion is sapping their energy to do it—has been, since he crashed into the barrier. The impact of the Galra fighter saved them, and the Lion saved Keith, and that's why Shiro's eyes are bruises and the Lion is useless—it's _him_. The Black Lion demands the most energy from its pilot.

How much energy does it take to keep a memory alive? To give it a place to live, and manifest it at will? More than either of them have.

This is his fault again. All of this is his fault.

The next time he manifests, it's in the world the Lion built for him, and the Lion is there and watching him.

There's something beautiful about that much strength in one package, that much engineering and science and raw power—and they built themselves, he remembers Coran saying.

It stands above him like a sentinel.

"We have lions on Earth," he tells it, before he can stop himself. He wants to talk, always, but that reticence keeps at bay, and there's nothing to stop him now.

"They're beautiful," he says, remembering every pictures he wondered at as a child. " _You're_ beautiful."

It's power and strength made metal and there's no pilot that doesn't see something breathtaking in a machine like that. He was lucky to pilot one at all.

Keith lays a hand on its nose, like the first time he piloted it, when Shiro was in danger and in need, and it bows to him.

"I'm sorry," he says. "Thank you for sending me here. Thank you for letting me see him again."

That's all he wanted, he realizes. He wanted to save Shiro, and he wanted to see him. He wanted to be with him. The Lion loves them both, and it exudes in everything it does. "Thank you," he says again, choked.

And: "You have to let me pilot," because that's their only way out of it. If he's been sucking the life out of them to exist, he has to return it, and this is all he's got.

He flares into existence.

* * *

Shiro sees him out of the corner of his helmet and shudders, the Lion moving with him, out of formation. A litany of voices blur across the radio but Shiro silences them with a slap to the control panel.

"Fuck," he gasps, ripping his helmet off, "why now?"

Not a question, but a curse. That's what he thinks Keith is now. And he's right.

"Let me help," Keith begs. Shiro can hear him now that they're connected by the Lion—and maybe he always could, because he still doesn't respond.

Head bowed, hands in his hair, radiating exhaustion—this is how Shiro looked his first morning back on earth, war-wounded and changed, words beyond him for that first hour, until keith had to pull him into the bathroom and push him into the shower, soak the hurt off him.

Some of it, at least.

Keith got soaked too, and that's always been it. Shiro is a creature of excellence, beyond compare. He wanted the stars, and he made keith want them too, but Keith isn't Shiro. He doesn't have Shiro's grace.

But he can pilot. and he can get them out of this.

"Shiro." He sets a hand on his shoulder and there's enough to him that he can feel it, but Shiro can't, not through the armor. There's sweat in his bangs and beading on his forehead from the helmet and the fight, weariness manifest. Keith hesitates, but there's more to gain from touching him than there is to lose, so he presses his fingers to the side of his face, right against his temple, at the edge of his undercut. "I don't have much time. Please let me help?"

He lets his fingers slide along Shiro's cheek bone until they're at the edge of the shadow under his eye. When he speaks, his voice is hoarse to his own ears. "Shiro. Please."

And that's what does it. That's what breaks him, finally. Shock, almost like fear, freezes Shiro's face under the bruise-eyed exhaustion and he whispers, "You're real?"

Is he?

Focus, focus. "I can pilot us out of here. Do you trust me?" The confession is on the tip of his tongue: _I'm the reason you can't pilot it yourself, it's not you, it's never been you_. But they don't have time, and the best apology is to fix what you've hurt and never do it again.

"I don't understand—how are you here? Keith?" His name sounds like it never has: high and pleading, the sound of something scared.

He deserves an honest answer, and Keith tries.

"I don't know. I think it was the Lion. Maybe it wanted to give me more time." He swallows, and whispers, "I think it took part of you to do it. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

Shiro grits his teeth, eyes turned down.

"It took me to this place..." Keith looks off out the window of the cockpit where there's fire and fighting, but also stars, trying to think of how to describe it. "It's—it's nice, actually. Like the sky at night."

There's nothing else to say. The fight won't wait, and Shiro is still staring at the floor, like it has more to say.

"Do you trust me?" Keith asks. Shiro closes his eyes, and nods, and stands up.

It's more of a relief than he expects it to be—back in the pilot's chair, and Voltron might be beyond his strength, but winning this isn't.

Keith closes his hands around the controls, still warm with Shiro's heat. He hasn't got any substance, but the Lion knows what he wants to do, and he can feel the line of energy that's been keeping him alive. It runs between him and Shiro and the Lion like a livewire.

The moment he punches the thrusters forward, the power flows in reverse. He's pouring himself into the fight in the most literal sense, and he burns with it in the best way. It's all he has to give, and all he wants to give it all.

"I've got this," Keith says, and Shiro burns.

* * *

Keith looks like a star about to die.

Bright as the sun, hard to look at head on, his edges flickering like the aurora Shiro saw once. It was an orbit mission before Kerberos, and he held on to that memory through months of empty space and a year of captivity—and he held on to this. Keith's shape, and the shadows in his hair, and in retrospect, he should have known.

In retrospect, he did. You don't cleave yourself to the color of the sunset you saw in someone's eyes once without being in love.

Watching him pilot was always a revelation. No matter what it is: a simulated ship or a Galra fighter or a desert bike—he makes it a part of himself, an extension of his own limbs, made of metal and power. Set him loose and watch him burn. Patience was the only thing he ever lacked—once Shiro helped him find it, that was it. Best of the best and unbeatable, even by Shiro, even then.

 _He's only going to get better._

The old thought sneaks in past the adrenaline and exhaustion, and the pride in it almost cuts his legs out from under him. It was true, once, but not anymore. The thing in front of him is cut from a flame and twice as ephemeral.

Keith burns through the Galra ships like they're paper, leaving a trail of fire in their wake that Shiro can catch out the corner of the window when they turn and head back for a second pass, and a third. When the flagship is all that's left, Keith streaks for it without pausing for a breath. Maybe he doesn't need to breathe. Shiro does, though, and he's left clinging to the back of the seat to hold himself up.

Keith glances up at him, grinning through his light—grinning like he knows a secret, and that secret is that he's going to win. "Almost there."

"Watch the cannon," Shiro says, mostly to himself, like they're back in the Garrison simulator, because he has to, but the cannon is gone before his mouth is closed. Gone—obliterated, like it was never there. The thing that took out forty rebel ships, and Keith destroys it on a whim.

The ship is almost as massive as the fleet hub they met Zarkon on that first time when Allura was captured and they were ally-less and out of options, and this is almost the same. There's a rawness to a fight like this. You fight with everything you've got because winning is your only option.

And finally, Shiro thinks they might. Keith was always their clutch. He's thrown himself into every fight. Zarkon has the Black Lion? Throw yourself at it and wrestle him for it until he takes you down. A Galra cruiser is about to take down the entire solar system? Throw yourself at that, too.

Shiro has no idea how he's going to win this, but he's sure he will, and that smile is still tugging at the edges of his lips where Shiro can glimpse it between the flicker-glow obscuring his edges. He's not moving now though. He's sizing up the ship with a tension that stretches from him to the Lion, like something about to strike for the kill. Shiro can feel it in his spine.

"Tell everyone to clear out."

Shiro doesn't hesitate. When the rebels and Paladins are safe, there's a dull pause that Shiro can count by the thud of his heartbeat, and then without any preamble, Keith shoots straight for the heart of the ship.

A knee jerk yell is on the tip of his tongue but he reins it in—his trust is absolute, in the Lion and in Keith, and Keith's determination is visible.

Keith goes like a comet. The light overflowing his edges coalesces and pulls inward, and that's what draws his eye more than anything outside.

And then they're through and back to facing open space, before Shiro fully comprehends what's happened. They've teleported, he realizes, right through the middle of it, and whatever Keith did in the millisecond they were inside was spectacular and ruinous.

The ship goes up in flame behind them. Shock gives way to awe; the radio silence gives way to gasps and hoots and praise—one dull roar of elation that Shiro has to pull his helmet off too escape.

"You did it." The awe comes out like disbelief. "You got it to teleport, but how did you—"

Keith is looking at him, and there's fear in his eyes.

He's not a star anymore but a candle guttering in its own wax, about to go out. His light is watery, and the look he turns on Shiro is on the edge of panic.

Keith's voice shakes when he whispers, "I think that's all I've got."

And that's it. To his grief, in that moment, Shiro can't muster a word. He watches Keith go out in terror and silence, and when he's gone, there's nothing to mark his absence.

"No, Keith, wait—" he says to himself.

The silence is absolute.

This is it. The second loss he warned himself against. There's no mirror to punch this time, nowhere to run, no way to hide from it. He ends up back in the seat, head bowed, trying to find his way past it. The helmet is still on the floor, yelling up at him, and for the first time he doesn't have an ounce of will to answer it.

"I just want him back," he whispers to the silence of the cockpit. "Just for a second, please."

But nothing. He gets nothing.

Duty dogs at his heels. There's clean up and negotiations and then they'll celebrate and make plans to do it all over again. Over and over, until the Galra drop or they do, and for the first time he's not sure he can do it. He flies back to the hangar on autopilot and sits there in the dark and silence while the other Lions land around him, his head bowed over his knees, running over everything he wanted to say.

Even if it wasn't really Keith at all, it was something. It was real. It deserved more—more than nothing, at least.

Some part of it doesn't fit together, and Shiro can't let it go.

 _Denial_ , supplies the meanest part of him. _You're in denial_.

But why would a glitch in the Lion's system take energy to keep alive? How could a memory be that powerful? How could a memory be that real?

Whatever it was, it knew Shiro, and maybe the Lion did too, but not like that.

The Lion powers down, but it flickers and stutters as it does, just like Keith did that first time in the Lion.

Exactly like Keith did.

* * *

He pleads, one more time.

This time the Lion hears him.

When he opens his eyes the world is built of stars and glass, like Keith said it would be, and this is a place Shiro knows. Shiro has been here before,

The beauty of it missed him the first time—Zarkon, and the heat of a fight he wasn't sure he could win blocked out all the finer details, but it's beautiful.

All the more so for what he sees lying in the middle of it. Keith, shaded in faintest violet—like he was in the real world, and like Shiro is now.

Even as Shiro kneels next to him, he doesn't want to touch. If he does, if his fingers go right through, that's it. There's nothing beyond that. He'll lie down right there, stretch out beside what he's lost, memorize what's left of his lines until he's gone. There's no energy left in him to do more.

So he hovers his hand over Keith's body, right at the edge of the light they're both made of. Keith's is fainter; he doesn't look the way he did on the video feed before Naxzela. He looks—dead. His cheeks are palled and thin, like a corpse that hasn't been allowed to decay, and the thought stills him.

"Hey, Keith," he whispers, and traces up his chest and over his neck where his collar bone juts out under the black fabric and the hood is pooled under his dark hair. The Marmora suit made him look small, but this is something else. This is what months sustained on Shiro's scraps have left him, and it occurs to Shiro for the first time—

"Why didn't you tell me he was here?"

He glances upward, but the Lion is quiet above him, still as a statue, like it's carved from the glass Keith is lying on. Even in his mind, there's not a whisper or hint of what the Lion wants him to do or know or say—and maybe that's its own answer. They've both been weakened by this, and their bond wasn't what it was. They don't mesh like they once did, but more than that, the Lion loved Keith, he realizes, and it's hard to trust the ones you love those you don't.

The thought bites. Keith, between worlds, for days on end—alone, even when Shiro was right there. The Lion isn't cruel though. It wouldn't do this without reason, without cause—

And that's when he feels it.

There's breath against his hand where it's hovering over Keith's cheek. Impossible, and faint, and perfect.

"Keith?" He forgets not to touch when he rolls Keith's face toward his, but his jaw is solid under Shiro's metal hand. His body is solid, and cold, and he's _breathing_. Shiro feels for a pulse and finds it, faint and slow, but there.

He's alive.

In this world at least, he's alive. Zarkon's words come rushing back to him:

 _When you die in this realm, your body dies as well._

Does it go both ways? Can you drag something back from the edge of death? He gathers Keith's body into his arms—too light, too frail—and wonders what it would take. Wonders what he could exchange for something this valuable, but there's nothing he has that stands equal to this: an entire life, writ large enough to rival everything else in his mind's eye. He knows it's hopeless, like he knows the old exhaustion pulsing behind his eyes and settling into his bones. This isn't something he can have, no matter how much he wants it.

If wanting were enough, he thinks. If only.

"Please let me have this," he says, to himself as much as anything else. It's worth a try, and a try is all he has. He let's his head fall, pulling Keith's head up so he can rest against the edge of his hair, resigned to stay that way. He feels Keith's breath on the inhale.

"Please let me have him," he begs again.

When he opens his eyes, he's sitting on the floor of the Lion, and there's a weight in his arms that's unmistakable.

* * *

Keith is shaking like he's half frozen to death, the skin of his neck almost that cold under Shiro's hand, and it's somehow no surprise at all that the first thing he does is tear himself away from Shiro's chest and throw up.

Shiro is the only thing holding him up, hands around his ribs. The armor is hanging loose where he's lost muscle and weight, but he's alive. He stinks of ozone and old sweat and bile, and the ribs under Shiro's hands are expanding and contracting as he fights for air, and he's _alive._

When he's done, Shiro heaves him up and pulls him in so tight that his feet are almost off the floor and his face is buried against Shiro's shoulder, both of them heedless of the mess down his front. It's secondary. Everything is secondary to the press of his body and the arms looped around his neck, hanging on to him like a Shiro's the only thing tethering him to life.

He's cold and bony and stinking, and perfect.

"I've got you." Shiro repositions them with a hand under Keith butt, boosting him up, securing him against the hard crush of his armor. He's shaking still, hair clammy with sweat cold sweat. "I've got you."

Shiro holds him there.

It's an indulgence. Keith needs care, but for a moment he lets them stay like that, reveling in a feeling that's miles beyond relief. He wonders if that's how Keith felt getting him back after Kerberos, and again, after his second capture—but in this, too, Shiro isn't Keith. He's not good at losing.

After this, he'll take any inch Keith lets him.

* * *

"You were in there for hours," Matt says, before the hatch swings all the way open and he sees what Shiro is carrying.

And screams.

It's piercing and uncalled for, but at least it breaks the ice as the worst possible reaction. The rest is a haze. Someone calls Coran, and they all crowd in around him and the precious thing he's carrying.

Keith is half conscious, still shuddering against him, and there's a limit to what he can comprehend about this. It's like learning Keith was gone in reverse—he can only pick up one thing at a time and look at it. The ribs sticking out under his gloved hands, the old sweat crusting Keith's hair, and the smell of him, which should be repulsive, but something in him is broken from this loss and nothing about Keith is unbeautiful.

His arms are closed around Shiro's neck, and his legs are wrapped around Shiro's waist, and he's everything.

Shiro wants to pull him down in a shower like Keith did with him, and soak his loss away, taste the skin stretched over his bones, see him happy again.

For once, duty eludes him. The team needs guidance, wants answers, but his world is narrowed down to one presence.

He takes Keith back to his room, because that's as far as he can think. Matt assigns everyone little tasks in absence of Shiro's ability to think about anything other than the body in his arms.

You can only lose something so many times—once, as it turns out, is his limit.

* * *

He's a mess.

It takes Coran and him both to get his clothes off and bundled into the shower. It's easier with two people, and Keith is still shaking, but so is Shiro.

"You had us worried, you know," Coran mentions, offhand, like Keith is a runaway pet. He's got his hands under Keith's arms, holding him up from behind while Shiro dries him off.

Keith croaks out a, "Sorry," eyes fastened to the floor where his sopping bangs are still dripping between them. Shiro is still firing on one cylinder, and all he can think is, _get him dry warm, get him warm, get him food, don't let this happen again._

Coran is a grounding presence. He prattles off on a tangent about the Lions and Alfor's theories, and Shiro is grateful for it, right down to his bones as he wipes the towel over Keith in a way that can't be mistaken for anything less intimate than it is. It feels important. It feels like something Keith should know.

This is what he means to Shiro, and he can do what he wants with that knowledge.

But Keith presses against his touch full-body, seeking comfort. His head falls forward against Shiro's shoulder—not languid, but tired in the same way Shiro is. Coran releases him slowly and excuses himself, and that's it.

You can't lose something and miss something like that and still play at pretending you don't want it. There's no line on him that Shiro doesn't want to follow, no jut of bone and muscle he doesn't want to trace.

He lets himself.

* * *

When Keith is clean and clothed and fed as much as he can take without throwing up again, and when Matt's herded everyone away, Shiro pulls Keith back into his arms under the double layer of blankets and presses a kiss to the corner of his jaw.

Keith finds his voice first.

"I'm sorry," he says into the silence, hoarse. That's the second time. "It's good to have you back."

The blow takes a second to hit home, but when it does, it's fatal. It doesn't make sense—Shiro isn't the one that left, but Shiro let him go, and Shiro lost him. That's not how Keith means it, but it's more true than it isn't. The body in his arms is still shaking.

There's nothing he can say, he realizes. Nothing that will fix this the way it needs to be. The reality of it steals over him. Mourning Keith, pulling him out of the Lion, touching him—that doesn't make up for what went wrong in the first place.

"It's good to be back," Shiro whispers against his hair, and then, softer, "Turn over."

Keith does, at effort and without question. He leaves space between them, but Shiro pulls him in with an arm around his hip. He was always too thin, but he was never delicate like this.

Months, Shiro thinks. Months sustained on nothing but the residual energy of him and the Lion, and that's not the kind of luck you get a second shot at. When they're flush, Keith jerks his hips back on instinct, but Shiro holds him there.

"I'm so sorry," Shiro whispers against his lips.

He can't see Keith's frown, but he feels it. "What? Why would you—"

Shiro silences him. It's too deep right off for a first kiss—a second, maybe—but the thing in him that's been putting him back together brick by brick is solidifying on this singular desire.

Every inch Keith gives him. Every inch, he wants.

Keith gives up trying to ask questions when Shiro settles over him. He's too small, too valuable, and Shiro's never been greedy like this before. It's going to be a problem, he realizes distantly, but that's for tomorrow.

They're both exhausted beyond reason, but this at least he has energy for. He pushes Keith back into the pillows until they're surging against each other weakly, and when Keith pulls up his arms and pulls him in, it's perfect.

* * *

He wakes the next morning with dark hair in his mouth and a long leg between his and warm breath against his neck and thinks:

 _I could wake up like this every day, for the rest of my life._


End file.
